Perhaps it doesn't. I'm just making the point that you are not special because you are military.
Unfortunately, your point that may be valid 'in abstracto', has no relation to the actual facts we're discussing. As soon as the guards had established he had a right to carry a rifle onto the plane, any search for other guns (that was what they try to find with a metal detector) or even a knife was a useless waste of time.
Forensic analysis of the massacre concluded that it was orchestrated by Eric Harris, who was a clinical psychopath. Dylan Klebold was just a maladjusted doofus that Harris took along for the ride.
This reminds me greatly of my previous assignment, where I had to work with (yet another) "difficult user". He had a Ph.D in statistics and sounded a bit by Zed. He had also done some work in datamining and data warehouses, so he started our first conversation by declaring himself an expert in my field. Great start:)
Ofcourse, as it turned out he was just very frustrated with his colleagues because he couldn't explain his ideas. No surprise there: he tried to explain very advanced mathematics with formulas, to people who barely managed to get a highschool education. After I provided an interface between the parties involved (my CS study came with a course in probability calculus so I could actually understand what he was doing) things went pretty smooth from there on. My advice to this user when I left was "get a good communications training". He said his manager was saying the same for about a year now but now it was coming from me (a techie) he'd actually think about it:)
People who can communicate are paid lots of money. You can have all the skills, but if you can't access them, or combine them, you're not getting much use out of that expertise. Zed's article being a case in point.
This is the same for the Netherlands, as I know by personal experience. Just sneeze when you're driving in front of a camera and *FLASH* you've got mail...
I agree completely - I love IT ever since I was 5 years old and saw my first computer. I hope to be doing it for the rest of my life. If the work is monotonous (happened to me once), switch jobs. IT is a huge field with many interesting application. Friends of mine work on fast DNA matrix viewers, on getting the computer to see your heartbeat from a distance, my cousin is writing programs for satellites and if you get tired of that, you can always start managing people or go do something else.
Ofcourse, it helps if you have a CS masters degree so you actually understand what you're doing when it's not the monkey-trick you learnt on your first week in the office...
Then again, one of my CS friends is now retraining as professional photographer, so perhaps the GP has a point. However, he was always in it for the money, not the computers, and I think that was what caught him in the end.
Interesting thing, since you mentioned the P = NP problem. One area of mathematics that is making heavy progress on that problem is (for some reason) Algebraic Geometry. It seems that Mathematicians are as interested in the P = NP problem as we Computer Scientists are. I wonder who will eventually solve it, and whether they'll get a Field Medal or a Turing Award;)
If you solve it, you're certainly up for the Turing award, but most likely for both.
Finally, ALL math is good. (So I'd let your passion decide.) I remember a math professor of mine commenting on a task he was working on for the forestry department of the university. The task was to compute the area of an arbitrary polygonal shape. The forestry dept first went to the CS department where they tried the normal triangularization trick but ran into trouble because that trick encounters difficulty when dealing with concave polygons. The math professor used Green's Theorem which also results is a much much cleaner algorithm.
Take both, discrete maths first. Every time you are reading in a file with a complex spec, you are basically using a finite state machine. After that, do linear algebra because you will need it to understand other complex issues in computer science.
As for the CS department above: I cringed. Ofcourse, I graduated under two people who are quite well-known for their geometric algorithms, but even a 2nd year student should be able to do better than triangulation. Triangulation is the bruteforce approach any software engineer could use. A computer scientist should have opened his books and used mathematics.
I went from $40,000 salary (before pay cuts) to $35/hr hourly which is about $73,000 annually, assuming no overtime (which I qualify for now as an hourly employee).
I just went to a company that values IT significanlty more than my last shop.
That certainly is an option all IT employees can use. Tell me, do they still need 500K+ new workers?
I did indeed read your post as "it's not a big deal, it's just an equipment failure and pilots can deal with it". What I am stressing is that there are a few situations where the pilots *cannot* deal with it, and planes do fall out of the sky as a consequence. Therefore, precautions had to be taken.
Ofcourse it wouldn't crash everything (which is the other extreme, and who cares about a microwave having to reset), but there were a few instances where it could have been lethal. That's why planes were being grounded, just to prevent those instances.
I admit I may have overreacted a bit to your post: I'm sort of allergic to anything that even looks like it might have anything to do with Y2K-denial, a few days ago we had a big article in the newspaper where basically the reporter was just saying "all this was overblown, it was basically a big scam". This, from the best newspaper in the country. Gaaah.
And guess what, not everything was caught. We had some failures after 2000 rolled in. We missed "some stuff". They were ALL attributed to other causes. No one could afford to admit to management that a single Y2K bug was missed. I should imagine this was not uncommon in most industries.
The commentators were mostly assholes with no real understanding, but it wasn't really hype. It would have been a disaster. We just fixed ( most of ) it.
So true - I was working for a national IT department of a huge multinational. We would have been bankrupt a few weeks after the Y2K rolled by, due to a complete inability to sell, move or even check the status of all our products sold (capital goods, ranging from 50K to 500000K in price). We wouldn't even have been able to log on to the terminals to repair anything, as the logon program checked for expiry of your password and EVERYONE expired at the turn of the millenium - including sysadmins. We discovered that during "testing day" when we arrived at 09:00 on a saturday, and everyone left at 10:00 again, because we couldn't do anything until the vendor had fixed the OS:)
Ofcourse we missed a few bugs, but we were all ordered to keep our mouths shut very tight about the cause of the bugs, or we'd be facing a firing squad or something similar.
Everytime I see someone blathering about how it was all a myth, I think "you weren't working in IT at the time, and certainly not near any mainframe". Makes me feel old, to have been a part of history...
The only part of an airplane I can imagine giving a tinker's damn about the date is a GPS, which synchronizes with the satellites and probably would correct its date anyway. And if the GPS of an airplane suddenly goes wonky? Gosh, the pilot just might have to use the charts and backup instruments he was trained on.... Just like if the GPS failed for some other reason. If the airplane falls out of the sky solely due to a GPS failure then there's something seriously wrong with the crew.
Planes have been known to fall out of the sky recently due to failures of the airflow measurement - a difference of 20 km/hr in measurement can mean the difference between having a safe flight or having no lift anymore and no way to easily correct that. Anything that measures speed also uses time (delta in position over time = speed), and when you deal with time you tend to have a date in there as well, somewhere around 23:59:59 and 00:00:00. It may not strictly speaking be needed, but can you guarantee that it is never done like that? On all airplanes, including some quite old ones, with all versions over all manufacturers of all devices to measure speed on airplanes?
As for the Y2K bug: if you're in the middle of a landing on autopilot, in difficult weather (december 31st is usually not the best of times for clear skies), and the autopilot decides to crap out at 20m above ground and gives you a hard landing, how are you ever going to respond in time to that? And what if the autopilot suddenly figures it's flying in the wrong direction, right after takeoff, and turns around? It only takes one bug, in one routine, to have a major crash.
Actually, Marx's main flaw was in how he valued technology. The man wasn't a starry-eyed idiot, but he just failed to see the value of automation - something not so obvious in his time. Marx directly claimed that machines cannot lower the cost of goods, because machines would naturally be sold for the value of the labor they replaced. Most of the benefit of capitalism is that technology reduces the cost of goods, so that our standard of living improves continuously over time despite the common man never getting a larger share of the wealth.
Actually, a lot of Marx's writings are about automation being crucial to both capitalism and communism as it drives down the cost of production. Also, since any activity in capitalism is itself subject to the same laws, prices will go down as more capitalists produce the same machinery, using other machines: the skill and cost of labor to create new machines go down, hence their value and in the end their price also go down. See 'wages, price and profit' for details.
No it doesn't. The theory of Communism proposes that humans will work for the betterment of their fellow tribe members. This works in small tribes where everyone knows each other (families and 'communes'), but was known in advance to fail for larger groups. The theory is bunk because it utterly fails to understand the fact that personal economic incentives are the primary driver of human behavior.
As was Marx's derivation of the value of the worker. He completely missed the fact that the value-add comes from the synergistic arrangement (arranged by the entrepreneur) of worker, raw materials, and the means of production.
You're wrong on both counts. As for the first, Marx merely said that it would be easier to work for the common good, as well as more efficient, in the long run. He wasn't proposing that humans worked for others for the hell of it, but because it would be the obvious smartest choice for themselves. Smarter than working for a capitalist who'd underpay you. And any self-employed entrepreneur knows it.
As for the second, let's do a little experiment: remove the worker from the equation and see how much value the synergistic arrangement can add. Now remove the capitalist from the equation and see how much value the worker can add with the materials and the machine. For bonus points, figure out what happens when you remove the machine or the materials or add a few marketeers and laywers for extra fun into the synergistic arrangement:)
What is typical, however, is massive hordes of stupidity to rally under a particular banner or cause which results in massive change and/or destruction.
Because, as we all know, people who rail against the status quo must be stupid... I mean, I have a good life so if someone wants to upset that, he or she must be stupid, right?
As for the "lack" of intellectual uprisings: do you actually watch the news? Do you realize we have a state called 'Iran' somewhere, where this is happening as we speak? Does 'Tiananmen square' ring a bell? You know, students getting killed because they demanded democratic change?
Of course you can't sympathize, that view is downright hateful, racist even.
It's also a staple of any religion that wants to outbreed the competing religions (or political viewpoints). Guess where the whole "go forth and multiply" stuff comes from...
It wasn't a firecracker, but according to the current reports it was a failed mixture of chemicals that didn't explode as well as the terrorists had hoped - that's what you get for just injecting chemicals instead of properly mixing them.
The perpetrator is claiming he received the explosives from Al-Qaeda in Jemen. He did visit Jemen before boarding this flight, so that is quite likely the source.
Also, it was a binary explosive: he was trying to inject liquid chemicals into solid chemicals strapped to his legs. They exploded mildly, but mostly set him on fire - that was were the bang and fire came from. Right then a Dutch passenger jumped over a few chairs and subdued him. Although I've read reports that the terrorist was "sitting dazed in his chair" - he'd probably expected to die right there, and when he didn't he was in shock.
Binary explosives are a bit hard to mix and if you don't get it right, you don't get a big bang. Also, it looks like there was no containing vessel so the bang could have been like gunpowder in the open: a big flash but apart from that, nothing much.
I'm wondering that kind of chemicals they were using though, because he was checked by security and nothing showed up on the scanners. He probably had the nitrogen-rich stuff strapped to his legs and harmless-looking stuff in his handluggage.
He did say "knowingly sells software (etc.)" - missing the word "defective" - and with the parent poster, I'm not sure that shooting up nearly every software vendor in existence would really help us. Unless you plan a hostile takeover...
Wait, now I see it! Here's what you should do if you own an unsuccesfull software company that never sold anything to the government!
1. Introduce plan to shoot all software saboteurs 2. Leave out the word "defective" so every current government software-supplier gets shot 3..... 4. Profit!:P
In 1995 I designed and built (most of) the software for the following CD-ROM: "Berg, J. van den, Duijfjes-Vellekoop, G.G.J., Kunenborg, R. & Tenback, R. (1995). Marburger Index Datenbank, ein Wegweiser zur Kunst in Deutschland (CD-ROM). Munchen: K.G. Saur Verlag. " (*)
It included several internal parsers, including one for a HTML-like language that separated the content of the database from the on-screen expression. Basically, my own miniature implementation of Mozilla. It was sold in musea throughout Germany.
I guess that should count as prior art. I'm pretty sure we could dig up the sourcecode if asked nicely.
(*) As an aside, I'm still pretty proud of that software. It runs like a charm on anything from windows 3.11 to Vista, will stay stable even with less than 1 KB of free memory (windows crashes before this program does) and we never had to do a bugfix. Written in around 20000 lines of C++. Chalk one up for rigorously applying and checking invariants and pre- and postconditions.
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... but neither of us is telling everyone (including the Dutch engineers in question) that they're stupid and don't know what they're talking about.
Don't worry. That's just the usual style of Dutch engineering discourse.
Toyota.
Apart from that, I'd say no.
Perhaps it doesn't. I'm just making the point that you are not special because you are military.
Unfortunately, your point that may be valid 'in abstracto', has no relation to the actual facts we're discussing. As soon as the guards had established he had a right to carry a rifle onto the plane, any search for other guns (that was what they try to find with a metal detector) or even a knife was a useless waste of time.
Forensic analysis of the massacre concluded that it was orchestrated by Eric Harris, who was a clinical psychopath. Dylan Klebold was just a maladjusted doofus that Harris took along for the ride.
[citation needed]
This reminds me greatly of my previous assignment, where I had to work with (yet another) "difficult user". He had a Ph.D in statistics and sounded a bit by Zed. He had also done some work in datamining and data warehouses, so he started our first conversation by declaring himself an expert in my field. Great start :)
Ofcourse, as it turned out he was just very frustrated with his colleagues because he couldn't explain his ideas. No surprise there: he tried to explain very advanced mathematics with formulas, to people who barely managed to get a highschool education. After I provided an interface between the parties involved (my CS study came with a course in probability calculus so I could actually understand what he was doing) things went pretty smooth from there on. My advice to this user when I left was "get a good communications training". He said his manager was saying the same for about a year now but now it was coming from me (a techie) he'd actually think about it :)
People who can communicate are paid lots of money. You can have all the skills, but if you can't access them, or combine them, you're not getting much use out of that expertise. Zed's article being a case in point.
Zed, is that you?
This is the same for the Netherlands, as I know by personal experience. Just sneeze when you're driving in front of a camera and *FLASH* you've got mail...
I couldn't agree more. I applaud your sentiment and wish that everyone was as smart as you!
Thank you,
The Dutch Institute of Education.
(currently competing with the USA for the chance to educate the top Chinese students)
I agree completely - I love IT ever since I was 5 years old and saw my first computer. I hope to be doing it for the rest of my life. If the work is monotonous (happened to me once), switch jobs. IT is a huge field with many interesting application. Friends of mine work on fast DNA matrix viewers, on getting the computer to see your heartbeat from a distance, my cousin is writing programs for satellites and if you get tired of that, you can always start managing people or go do something else.
Ofcourse, it helps if you have a CS masters degree so you actually understand what you're doing when it's not the monkey-trick you learnt on your first week in the office...
Then again, one of my CS friends is now retraining as professional photographer, so perhaps the GP has a point. However, he was always in it for the money, not the computers, and I think that was what caught him in the end.
Interesting thing, since you mentioned the P = NP problem. One area of mathematics that is making heavy progress on that problem is (for some reason) Algebraic Geometry. It seems that Mathematicians are as interested in the P = NP problem as we Computer Scientists are. I wonder who will eventually solve it, and whether they'll get a Field Medal or a Turing Award ;)
If you solve it, you're certainly up for the Turing award, but most likely for both.
Finally, ALL math is good. (So I'd let your passion decide.) I remember a math professor of mine commenting on a task he was working on for the forestry department of the university. The task was to compute the area of an arbitrary polygonal shape. The forestry dept first went to the CS department where they tried the normal triangularization trick but ran into trouble because that trick encounters difficulty when dealing with concave polygons. The math professor used Green's Theorem which also results is a much much cleaner algorithm.
Take both, discrete maths first. Every time you are reading in a file with a complex spec, you are basically using a finite state machine. After that, do linear algebra because you will need it to understand other complex issues in computer science.
As for the CS department above: I cringed. Ofcourse, I graduated under two people who are quite well-known for their geometric algorithms, but even a 2nd year student should be able to do better than triangulation. Triangulation is the bruteforce approach any software engineer could use. A computer scientist should have opened his books and used mathematics.
If you have a coffee fund, and you have money left over, you are screwing people.
I don't think times are so hard they have to prostitute themselves.
I went from $40,000 salary (before pay cuts) to $35/hr hourly which is about $73,000 annually, assuming no overtime (which I qualify for now as an hourly employee).
I just went to a company that values IT significanlty more than my last shop.
That certainly is an option all IT employees can use. Tell me, do they still need 500K+ new workers?
I did indeed read your post as "it's not a big deal, it's just an equipment failure and pilots can deal with it". What I am stressing is that there are a few situations where the pilots *cannot* deal with it, and planes do fall out of the sky as a consequence. Therefore, precautions had to be taken.
Ofcourse it wouldn't crash everything (which is the other extreme, and who cares about a microwave having to reset), but there were a few instances where it could have been lethal. That's why planes were being grounded, just to prevent those instances.
I admit I may have overreacted a bit to your post: I'm sort of allergic to anything that even looks like it might have anything to do with Y2K-denial, a few days ago we had a big article in the newspaper where basically the reporter was just saying "all this was overblown, it was basically a big scam". This, from the best newspaper in the country. Gaaah.
You see failure. I see a business opportunity. Get together with that manager and drive Radio Shack out of town.
And guess what, not everything was caught. We had some failures after 2000 rolled in. We missed "some stuff". They were ALL attributed to other causes. No one could afford to admit to management that a single Y2K bug was missed. I should imagine this was not uncommon in most industries.
The commentators were mostly assholes with no real understanding, but it wasn't really hype. It would have been a disaster. We just fixed ( most of ) it.
So true - I was working for a national IT department of a huge multinational. We would have been bankrupt a few weeks after the Y2K rolled by, due to a complete inability to sell, move or even check the status of all our products sold (capital goods, ranging from 50K to 500000K in price). We wouldn't even have been able to log on to the terminals to repair anything, as the logon program checked for expiry of your password and EVERYONE expired at the turn of the millenium - including sysadmins. We discovered that during "testing day" when we arrived at 09:00 on a saturday, and everyone left at 10:00 again, because we couldn't do anything until the vendor had fixed the OS :)
Ofcourse we missed a few bugs, but we were all ordered to keep our mouths shut very tight about the cause of the bugs, or we'd be facing a firing squad or something similar.
Everytime I see someone blathering about how it was all a myth, I think "you weren't working in IT at the time, and certainly not near any mainframe". Makes me feel old, to have been a part of history...
The only part of an airplane I can imagine giving a tinker's damn about the date is a GPS, which synchronizes with the satellites and probably would correct its date anyway. And if the GPS of an airplane suddenly goes wonky? Gosh, the pilot just might have to use the charts and backup instruments he was trained on. ... Just like if the GPS failed for some other reason. If the airplane falls out of the sky solely due to a GPS failure then there's something seriously wrong with the crew.
Planes have been known to fall out of the sky recently due to failures of the airflow measurement - a difference of 20 km/hr in measurement can mean the difference between having a safe flight or having no lift anymore and no way to easily correct that. Anything that measures speed also uses time (delta in position over time = speed), and when you deal with time you tend to have a date in there as well, somewhere around 23:59:59 and 00:00:00. It may not strictly speaking be needed, but can you guarantee that it is never done like that? On all airplanes, including some quite old ones, with all versions over all manufacturers of all devices to measure speed on airplanes?
As for the Y2K bug: if you're in the middle of a landing on autopilot, in difficult weather (december 31st is usually not the best of times for clear skies), and the autopilot decides to crap out at 20m above ground and gives you a hard landing, how are you ever going to respond in time to that? And what if the autopilot suddenly figures it's flying in the wrong direction, right after takeoff, and turns around? It only takes one bug, in one routine, to have a major crash.
Actually, Marx's main flaw was in how he valued technology. The man wasn't a starry-eyed idiot, but he just failed to see the value of automation - something not so obvious in his time. Marx directly claimed that machines cannot lower the cost of goods, because machines would naturally be sold for the value of the labor they replaced. Most of the benefit of capitalism is that technology reduces the cost of goods, so that our standard of living improves continuously over time despite the common man never getting a larger share of the wealth.
Actually, a lot of Marx's writings are about automation being crucial to both capitalism and communism as it drives down the cost of production. Also, since any activity in capitalism is itself subject to the same laws, prices will go down as more capitalists produce the same machinery, using other machines: the skill and cost of labor to create new machines go down, hence their value and in the end their price also go down. See 'wages, price and profit' for details.
No it doesn't. The theory of Communism proposes that humans will work for the betterment of their fellow tribe members. This works in small tribes where everyone knows each other (families and 'communes'), but was known in advance to fail for larger groups. The theory is bunk because it utterly fails to understand the fact that personal economic incentives are the primary driver of human behavior.
As was Marx's derivation of the value of the worker. He completely missed the fact that the value-add comes from the synergistic arrangement (arranged by the entrepreneur) of worker, raw materials, and the means of production.
You're wrong on both counts. As for the first, Marx merely said that it would be easier to work for the common good, as well as more efficient, in the long run. He wasn't proposing that humans worked for others for the hell of it, but because it would be the obvious smartest choice for themselves. Smarter than working for a capitalist who'd underpay you. And any self-employed entrepreneur knows it.
As for the second, let's do a little experiment: remove the worker from the equation and see how much value the synergistic arrangement can add. Now remove the capitalist from the equation and see how much value the worker can add with the materials and the machine. For bonus points, figure out what happens when you remove the machine or the materials or add a few marketeers and laywers for extra fun into the synergistic arrangement :)
What is typical, however, is massive hordes of stupidity to rally under a particular banner or cause which results in massive change and/or destruction.
Because, as we all know, people who rail against the status quo must be stupid... I mean, I have a good life so if someone wants to upset that, he or she must be stupid, right?
As for the "lack" of intellectual uprisings: do you actually watch the news? Do you realize we have a state called 'Iran' somewhere, where this is happening as we speak? Does 'Tiananmen square' ring a bell? You know, students getting killed because they demanded democratic change?
Of course you can't sympathize, that view is downright hateful, racist even.
It's also a staple of any religion that wants to outbreed the competing religions (or political viewpoints). Guess where the whole "go forth and multiply" stuff comes from...
It wasn't a firecracker, but according to the current reports it was a failed mixture of chemicals that didn't explode as well as the terrorists had hoped - that's what you get for just injecting chemicals instead of properly mixing them.
The perpetrator is claiming he received the explosives from Al-Qaeda in Jemen. He did visit Jemen before boarding this flight, so that is quite likely the source.
Also, it was a binary explosive: he was trying to inject liquid chemicals into solid chemicals strapped to his legs. They exploded mildly, but mostly set him on fire - that was were the bang and fire came from. Right then a Dutch passenger jumped over a few chairs and subdued him. Although I've read reports that the terrorist was "sitting dazed in his chair" - he'd probably expected to die right there, and when he didn't he was in shock.
Binary explosives are a bit hard to mix and if you don't get it right, you don't get a big bang. Also, it looks like there was no containing vessel so the bang could have been like gunpowder in the open: a big flash but apart from that, nothing much.
I'm wondering that kind of chemicals they were using though, because he was checked by security and nothing showed up on the scanners. He probably had the nitrogen-rich stuff strapped to his legs and harmless-looking stuff in his handluggage.
He did say "knowingly sells software (etc.)" - missing the word "defective" - and with the parent poster, I'm not sure that shooting up nearly every software vendor in existence would really help us. Unless you plan a hostile takeover...
Wait, now I see it! Here's what you should do if you own an unsuccesfull software company that never sold anything to the government!
1. Introduce plan to shoot all software saboteurs .... :P
2. Leave out the word "defective" so every current government software-supplier gets shot
3.
4. Profit!
In 1995 I designed and built (most of) the software for the following CD-ROM:
"Berg, J. van den, Duijfjes-Vellekoop, G.G.J., Kunenborg, R. & Tenback, R. (1995). Marburger Index Datenbank, ein Wegweiser zur Kunst in Deutschland (CD-ROM). Munchen: K.G. Saur Verlag. " (*)
It included several internal parsers, including one for a HTML-like language that separated the content of the database from the on-screen expression. Basically, my own miniature implementation of Mozilla.
It was sold in musea throughout Germany.
I guess that should count as prior art. I'm pretty sure we could dig up the sourcecode if asked nicely.
(*) As an aside, I'm still pretty proud of that software. It runs like a charm on anything from windows 3.11 to Vista, will stay stable even with less than 1 KB of free memory (windows crashes before this program does) and we never had to do a bugfix. Written in around 20000 lines of C++. Chalk one up for rigorously applying and checking invariants and pre- and postconditions.